Download PDF | Norman Housley - Crusading in the Fifteenth Century_ Message and Impact , Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2004.
262 Pages
Notes on the Contributors
János M. Bak is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Central European University of Budapest and has published extensively on the social and legal history of Hungary and its neighbours.
Nancy Bisaha teaches at Vassar College. She is the author of a book and several articles on humanism and crusade: Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); ‘Pope Pius Ils Letter to Sultan Mehmed II: A Reexamination', Crusades 1 (2002); and 'Petrarch's Vision of the Muslim and Byzantine East', Speculum 76 (2001).
John Edwards is Senior Research Fellow in Spanish at the University of Oxford. He has published extensively on Spain and on the Jews in the Middle Ages, in particular Christian Córdoba. The City and its Region in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1982); The Jews in Christian Europe, 1400-1700 (London, 1988); The Jews in Western Europe, 1400-1600 (Manchester, 1994); Religion and Society in Spain, c. 1492 (Aldershot, 1996); The Spanish Inquisition (2nd edition Stroud, 2003); and The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474—1520 (Oxford, 2000).
Johannes Helmrath is Professor of Medieval History at The Humboldt University in Berlin. He is author of Das Basler Konzil 1431-1449 (Cologne: Bóhlau, 1987), and of several articles about conciliar and parliamentary history the humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, and European humanism. He is preparing a book on Piccolomini and oratory at the German Reichstage.
Norman Housley is Professor of History at the University of Leicester. He has written several books on the history of the later crusades, in particular The Later Crusades, 1274-1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford, 1992); Documents on the Later Crusades, 1274-1580 (Basingstoke, 1996); Crusading and Warfare in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Aldershot, 2001); and Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002).
Margaret Meserve teaches at the University of Notre Dame. She has published several articles on the historical and political writing of humanists on the Islamic East. She is translating the Commentaries of Pope Pius II for the I Tatti Renaissance Library (vol. 1 appeared in 2003), and writing a book on the historiography of Islam in the Renaissance.
Natalia Nowakowska has recently completed a doctoral thesis on Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon, Prince of Poland (1468-1503) at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.
Jacques Paviot is Professor of Medieval History at Université de Paris XII - Val de Marne. He is author of La Politique navale des ducs de Bourgogne, 1384—1482 (Lille, 1995), and Portugal et Bourgogne au XVe siécle (Lisbon-Paris 1995). He organized and published the international colloquium Nicopolis 1396-1996 (Dijon, Annales de Bourgogne, 1997). His most recent book is Les Ducs de Bourgogne, la croisade et l'Orient (fin XIVe s.— Xve s.) (Paris, 2003).
Claudius Sieber-Lehmann teaches medieval history at the University of Basel. His dissertation was published as Spätmittelalterlicher Nationalismus. Die Burgunderkriege am Oberrhein und in der Eidgenossenschaft, Veróffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte Nr. 116 (Góttingen 1995).
Nicolas Vatin is Director of Research at the CNRS (Paris), and Director of Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (IVe Section). A specialist in Ottoman history, he has published, among other studies, L’Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem, l'Empire ottoman et la Méditerranée orientale entre les deux sieges de Rhodes (1480-1522) (Louvain-Paris, 1995); Sultan Djem. Un prince ottoman dans l'Europe du XVe siècle d'après deux sources contemporaines (Ankara, 1997); Rhodes et l'ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem (Paris, 2000); and Les Ottomans et l'Occident (XVe s.-XVle s.) (Istanbul, 2001).
Introduction
Norman Housley
Crusading in the fifteenth century
In August 1463 the Cardinal-legate John Bessarion issued detailed instructions ‘to the preachers appointed by him to preach the cross in the illustrious city of Venice and its lordship’.! Bessarion began by outlining the framework for the preaching campaign that he envisaged. He divided the Venetian lands into zones and allocated them to his preachers. They could conscript other clerics to assist them and had the authority to remit 100 days' enjoined penance to people who came to hear them preach the crusade. They were to preach on all feast-days and other occasions as they saw fit, and they were to exhort their audiences to take the cross to fight personally, to send substitutes or donate money or items that could later be sold. Helpfully, for both his preachers and for us, the cardinal sketched out the themes he intended his appointees to use. These revolved around the cross as ‘the most potent symbol of our salvation' and the justice and sanctity of the struggle against the Turks. "Those who up to this point have lived badly, involving themselves in murders, thefts, rapes, arson and all manner of crimes' were now being offered the chance to redeem themselves and earn eternal life.
Bessarion went further. He provided the wording of the prayer that was to be said when the cross, made of red silk or cloth, was pinned with a needle to the breast of the crucesignandus, who would later sew it firmly into place. He outlined the formula of the absolution and the wording of the letter that the crucesignatus was to receive conferring on him the plenary indulgence, including the variants that were to be used in the case of substitutes and their sponsors. He set out guidelines relating to groups of religious who clubbed together to send fighters, and he called for collection chests to be set up and for weekly masses to be said on behalf of the crusade. Domestic opposition also received his attention: anybody who impeded the crusade preaching was to be excommunicated, and absolution was to be denied to those who defrauded funds collected for the crusade, transported arms to the Turks or their allies, or placed obstacles in the path of crusaders seeking to fulfil their vows. And Bessarion was realistic enough to allow his preachers to draw five ducats a month as a subsistence allowance from the money that they collected.
Bessarion's instructions of 1463 are a remarkable synthesis of the old and the new. Certain themes, such as the fall of Constantinople and the threat that the Turks posed to home and hearth, were relative newcomers to crusading rhetoric. "The Turk, not content [with what he has], is making eager preparations to subjugate the entire world, starting with Italy.' Other themes, like the atrocities committed by the Turks, their destruction of relics and their taunting of Christians, the call for vengeance, the imperative to defend fellow Christians in the East, the potency of the cross and the summons to repentance, were as old as Urban Ils preaching at Clermont in 1095. And here, in a nutshell, is the paradox that confronts the serious student of crusading in the fifteenth century. Faced with documents like this one, nobody could seriously deny that the crusade was still being preached with vigour in the midfifteenth century and that Catholics had as much opportunity to earn redemption through penitential combat as their forefathers had for three centuries before them. It is true that the cardinal's text forms one thread in a very large tapestry: the last big attempt to organize a broadbased passagium against the Turks, to which its author, Pope Pius II, devoted an unusual amount of his time and energy. But if it was a particularly impressive enterprise, it was far from unique. Crusading, in other words, was an important feature of the period; it formed a part of people's lives. Yet a case can also be made for the viewpoint that this crusading did not cut deep into contemporary affairs, that it was reactive, formulaic and lacked popular resonance. According to this view, it was reactive because, without the threat posed to Catholic Christianity by the Turks, it is possible that there would have been no crusading at all. Bessarion's appeal to self-interest makes this clear: 'If we are unmoved by love for religion and calamity [in the East], let us be moved by our country, our homes, our children, our family, and our wives.' It was formulaic because the essential features of crusade preaching and of taking the cross had long since been clarified and made subject to the centralized direction of the Church. The chain of command, from Pius II down to those clerics who were dragooned into service by Bessarion's appointees, is apparent. As for lack of resonance at grass roots level, Pius Il's own lament in his Commentaries constitutes powerful testimony to it. People no longer believed what was said by those in authority in the Church; "like insolvent tradesmen we are without credit’.?
Itis thus possible to adopt very different positions on crusading in the fifteenth century: that the volume of surviving evidence forces us to take it seriously as an expression of religious life that possessed numerous political and cultural ramifications, or that it was a stale and sterile response to the new Islamic threat. In the past historians have taken up both positions as well as others lying somewhere in between.? In many cases their approach has derived from their own perspective on these events. Steven Runciman's well-known A History of the Crusades makes a good starting point. The brief Runciman set himself was to tell the story of the Latin settlements in the Holy Land and of the series of great expeditions (passagia) that established them and helped defend them against their Islamic neighbours. From that point of view it made methodological sense to end in 1291, which also provided a satisfying grand finale in terms of narrative structure. But Runciman was by training and sympathy a Byzantinist. He viewed the crusades to the Holy Land, and the states which they set up in Syria and Palestine, essentially as intrusions into a region which remained alien to the western Europeans involved, and he believed that their impact on the history of Byzantium was disastrous. The Fourth Crusade and the Latin conquest of Constantinople weakened the Byzantine Empire irreparably and laid the basis for the fall of the capital to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. For Runciman it was the latter date that gave true closure to his story, so he wrote an epilogue, entitled "The Last Crusades', that dealt not just with projects to recover the Holy Land after 1291, but also with western attempts to defend Constantinople. Nor could he resist continuing past 1453 to include the crusade ambitions of Pope Pius II. Indeed, there was a narrative logic in doing so, for Pius's inability to rekindle the enthusiasm aroused by Pope Urban II at Clermont, and his death at Ancona in August 1464 while awaiting the arrival of an army which did not exist, formed conclusions which were as convincing as the Mamluk conquest of Acre in 1291. In a sense, therefore, Runciman's account has two conclusions, one bringing to a close the epic of Latin Christendom's occupation of the holy places, and the second approaching the crusades from the broader viewpoint of relations between Western and Eastern Christianity. Both were sombre perspectives, telling a tale of prejudice, misunderstandings and disasters, but the second had more tragic dimensions because of the opportunities that were lost and the many lives that were ruined as a result.*
Runciman’s view was that from the imperial palaces of Constantinople. A rather different perspective was held by those whose native lands were subjugated and in some cases occupied by the Turks. They had a deep sense of the historical significance of events that played such a large part in shaping the histories of their countries, in some cases right up to the wars of liberation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the most intriguing collections of sources for fifteenth-century crusading is Nicolae Iorga’s Notes et extraits pour servir à l'histoire des croisades au XV siécle, published in six series between 1899 and 1916. The Notes et extraits is a remarkable series illustrating both the strengths and the weaknesses of its editor. It consists of hundreds of documents about the Turkish advance in the Balkans and attempts to resist it, transcribed in dozens of libraries and archives scattered across Europe in the years before the First World War by a man whose stamina has surely never been surpassed in the historical profession. In his preface to series four, lorga wrote with nostalgia of his ‘projet de jeunesse’,
une histoire de l'idée de la croisade après les dernières expéditions dirigées contre la Syrie ou l'Égypte du Soudan, c'est-à-dire des projets formés à partir du XV-e siécle et des combats portés au nom du méme idéal qui avait inspiré jadis Godefroy de Bouillon, mais contre des ennemis nouveaux, les Turcs établis en Europe pour fonder et dominer une Byzance musulmane.?
Reading the Notes et extraits in the light of Iorga's formidably learned early study, Philippe de Mézieres (1327-1405) et la croisade au XIVe siecle (Paris, 1896), it is hard not to regret the diversion of efforts which occurred. Iorga was a polymath and an exceptionally gifted scholar. He was capable of dictating a 350-page history of his native land in 28 hours and he maintained a scarcely credible pace of work: in a single year, 1928, he wrote 46 books, gave 370 lectures and attended 64 conferences.® Yet it may be misguided to regret such a lost work. Iorga's central concern was the history of Romania and of the succession of powers that had occupied it. What drove him to collect and publish his texts on the crusades was his burning nationalism, and his determination to fill the distressing lacunae that existed in Romanian history and made it vulnerable to the territorial claims of its more powerful neighbours. This nationalism, coupled with his strong sense of public duty, led him to invest his energies in numerous other projects, scholarly, literary, educational and journalistic; above all, he pursued a career in politics, which did not suit his temperament and ended with his assassination by the Romanian fascists in 1940. His sheer speed of production, moreover, bore a price in terms of care and accuracy. It is characteristic that the later volumes of the Notes et extraits carry no editorial system or apparatus: the impression they give is that Iorga was keen to rush as many documents into print as quickly as possible. His later scholarly works were criticized for their errors.”
It is not hard to imagine how a multi-volume Histoire des croisades au XVe siécle written by Nicolae Iorga would have read. Although he was fascinated by the Ottoman Empire and wrote a highly praised history of it? his underlying belief in the national principle caused him to view the Ottoman conquests as a retrograde step in the development of the Balkan peoples. In particular, it was the historic mission of Romania to act as western Europe's antemurale. It was a land where the best elements of Latin, Germanic and Slavic influences coexisted, and the Romanians could only achieve their full potential if these elements were held in balance. In the same way, extraneous influences, be they Muslim or Jewish, were detrimental to the flowering of the national character and must be resisted. When it was associated with the heroic resistance of the Balkan peoples, the crusade was regarded as by definition a good thing, 'les nobles efforts faits, à l'époque de la Renaissance triomphante, par l'Europe chrétienne pour s'opposer à l'envahissement des “barbares” asiatiques’.? Attempts to organize it merited praise, contemporary sceptics were dismissed as misguided and ultimate failure was a cause for regret. It would be harsh to censure a scholar of Iorga's generation too heavily for holding to value judgements such as these: explicitly or implicitly they have characterized a good deal of the more recent scholarship. In 1979 a Turkish delegate at a NATO meeting held in Fort St Angelo, the great Maltese fortress of the Knights of St John, commented, ʻI believe I am the first Turk that has penetrated this far’.!° Such jocularity was a breakthrough of sorts: it is hard to imagine it being expressed even a generation previously.
A residual anti-Turkish sentiment can be detected even in the work of the scholar who has come closer than anybody else to providing a full account of the crusading response to the Turkish advance, the American Kenneth M. Setton. In his monumental four-volume The Papacy and the Levant (1204-1571) (1976-84) Setton set himself the task of describing the papacy's relations with the East from the Fourth Crusade to the battle of Lepanto in 1571. Of necessity this entailed a detailed treatment of all crusading projects directed towards the East, though they were woven in with accounts of papal negotiations with Byzantium and the Christian Churches in the East. On the other hand, the emergence of the Ottoman threat in the fifteenth century, coupled with the papal resort to crusade as a means of resisting it, meant that Setton's second volume, which deals with the period 1402-1503, is to all intents and purposes an account of papal crusading activity during these years. Setton's scholarly interests, and to a large extent his sympathies, were divided between Rome and Venice, with whose archives he was very familiar.!! This was beneficial because while he gave full attention to the efforts made by the popes to regenerate crusading activity, he accorded equal weight to the host of commercial and political factors which in the case of Venice above all (though far from uniquely) stood in the way of these efforts succeeding. In the breadth of his scholarly concerns, his massive learning and his close familiarity with archival documents, Setton sometimes reminds one of Iorga, but by focusing on his planned study over a long period of time, and deploying meticulous scholarly techniques, he was able to deliver the detailed study of crusading activity which had eluded the Romanian.
That said, volume II of The Papacy and the Levant is not a definitive account of anti-Ottoman crusading activity. There are several reasons for this. One is that, as I have already mentioned, Setton was unable to be completely objective in his treatment of the Turks. This is not to say that he displayed prejudice, rather that he was content to convey the stereotyped and demonic portrayal of the Turks that he encountered in his sources, instead of trying to probe the underlying values and views of the world that created and sustained such images. This reflected Setton's most serious scholarly failing, his lack of interest in analysis as a tool of historical study. The condemnation of ‘l’histoire événementielle’ which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, the veneration for structured analysis as the only credible explanatory mechanism available to the professional historian, and the eventual reinstatement of narrative as a respectable approach, were trends which bypassed Setton altogether. Throughout his career he preferred the narrative mode, the alternative being a style of essay which reads less like intellectual engagement than a leisurely stroll in the company of a learned and urbane guide.” For all its remarkable qualities The Papacy and the Levant is best approached not as a work of history but as a mediated form of source collection; it is rich in quotations from and references to original documents, but its author rarely used them to recreate why things happened as they did. Moreover, despite his remark that the historian ‘opens up the approach to the hovels of the poor as well as to the palaces of the great',? Setton was fascinated by court and governmental records, the sources of the elite, above all those of the papacy and Venice. This meant that when examining crusading projects he rarely followed the trail beyond the issuing of bulls decreeing preaching and the collection of funds. His love for a good story led him to describe what happened at 'ground floor level' in the case of great events such as the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the relief of Belgrade in 1456 and the defence of Rhodes in 1480. But he showed little interest in the *middle ground' of crusade preaching and recruitment, together with its essential backcloth, the place which crusading held in contemporary culture. This means that the view that we acquire of crusading from The Papacy and the Levant is partial and selective; it resembles the picture of contemporary life that would result from reading only The Financial Times or The Economist.
Kenneth Setton's other major contribution to the subject came in his editing of the multi-volume History of the Crusades (second edition 1969-90). We might expect that this, the most ambitious post-war collaborative treatment of the crusades, would offer the analysis that The Papacy and the Levant fails to deliver. Such hopes are bolstered by the fact that the crusades which occurred after 1291 are given a good deal of attention, with the whole of volume III dedicated to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and further chapters on this period appearing in volume VI. Unfortunately, the chapters on crusading in the fifteenth century are not strong. It is perhaps inevitable that in a collaborative work, no central argument emerges relating to the place which crusading held in fifteenth-century society. But even the descriptions of military activity, whether it was conducted by crusading forces or by the Knights of St John, exist without more than a cursory consideration of the role which was played by religious values and beliefs in the mobilization of men and the raising of money.
To date, then, fifteenth-century crusading has not been accorded a comprehensive and in-depth study, despite attracting the attention of scholars of the calibre of Nicolae Iorga and Kenneth Setton. On the other hand, it has generated an encouraging number of studies addressing specific aspects or episodes in the struggle to hold back the Turks by crusading means. If these studies do not fully address the central issue of vitality or decline, they do provide a scaffolding of scholarship which makes that issue easier to approach with confidence. The work of Setton and others on the papacy as the initiating authority has, for example, been complemented by a broad range of published studies on the role played by the dukes of Burgundy and their court. In these works, moreover, the continuing appeal of crusading and its roots in court and chivalric culture have received the attention they require, because the Burgundian response to the Ottoman advance and the resulting papal exhortations to take action was obviously much more than a simple defence mechanism.!*
In accounts of Burgundian interest in crusading against the Turks the emphasis often placed on copying the deeds of ancestors and Christian heroes from the past has the effect of pointing to an essential continuity in ideals and attitudes. Much the same can be said of Portuguese crusading enthusiasm in the age of Henry ‘the Navigator'.? But an important strand in the most recent research has demonstrated the impact on crusading goals and rhetoric of the new humanist values. A large group of scholars, including Nancy Bisaha, Robert Black, James Hankins, Johannes Helmrath and Margaret Meserve, have explored the symbiosis of the New Learning with crusading which was achieved by Italian humanists like Benedetto Accolti, Francesco Filelfo and, most notably, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II). It is becoming apparent that the coexistence of old and new ideas within crusading in this period is an important consideration in achieving a balance between the positive and negative views on the subject outlined above, because it is only when we have a full view of what crusading actually meant to contemporaries that we can gauge their receptivity to it.
Another area of research characterized by impressive recent output is the early history of the Ottoman Turks. Thanks to the scholarship of men like Franz Babinger, Kenneth Setton's generation was far from being ill-informed on the enemy faced by crusading enthusiasts, but more recently scholars such as Daniel Goffman, Colin Imber and Cemal Kafadar have analysed afresh both the sultanate's fourteenth-century origins and the nature of its drive to conquest once it had recovered from Timur the Lame's devastating onslaught." This is highly relevant to the crusading response to that drive. Our overall view of the military viability of the West's reaction is obviously shaped in part by our evaluation of its Turkish adversary. This applies in particular to certain key events, such as the relief of Belgrade in 1456 and the defence of Rhodes in 1480, our reading of which hinges on our knowledge of the Turkish military system and the efficiency with which it was put to work in specific campaigns. And the comparative quiescence of the Balkan peoples in the face of Turkish conquest becomes easier to comprehend once such easily demonized features of the Ottoman system as the devsirme (the round-up of promising Christian children for enlistment in the sultan's service) are properly understood. It is possible that the shrill denunciation of the Turks which we encounter in the writings of Bessarion and Pius II derived from the unpalatable fact that Turkish conquest was actually not that painful an experience. This may be deduced from the way in which the rule of some Christian princes came to be unfavourably contrasted with that of the sultan. The extent of contemporaries' knowledge of the Turks is a problematic issue, but clearly the more we know about the nature of the sultanate and the goals of its ruling cadres, the more confident we can feel in assessing the public response in the West which, it is increasingly clear, was both subject to change and more nuanced than one might expect.!?
Message and impact
The twofold agenda of this collection of essays can best be illustrated by returning to the Bessarion text of 1463. First, there are clear gains to be made from focusing on what the message of crusading consisted of in the fifteenth-century context. This is partly because of the entry of new themes, values and language into the discourse of crusade. It is also because the message differed in accordance with both circumstances and audience. In our 1463 text, for example, Bessarion made great play of the fall of Constantinople ten years previously, and of the fact that Venice was now at war with the sultan.
The rulers of Venice have taken up arms against the Turks, and must persevere until the death of the last enemy, and others should be encouraged by their example, since through heaven's favour they are the most powerful and worthy of all Christians. Also, their lands are nearer to the Turks.
In other words, a person moved to take the cross, above all in the lands subject to Venice, could expect encouragement and perhaps assistance from the state in fulfilling their vow. More generally, the message that reached Hungary was couched in terms of that kingdom's antemurale function, a role to which the Knights of St John also made repeated claim in their fund-raising techniques.
In the Iberian lands the message varied even more. The crusade for which Bessarion hoped to recruit in 1463 was preached in Castile, where it aroused an amount of interest which disconcerted the king, and the papal curia repeatedly hoped to enlist the services of the king of Aragon/Naples and his fleet against the Ottoman Turks. But in Iberia the cruzada normally meant the war against the Moorish emirate of Granada. In Castile the historic duty of reconquest (Reconquista) was taken seriously by the kings and their critics, while their neighbours in Portugal let no opportunity slip to climb aboard the crusading bandwagon by claiming equivalent rights and privileges for the warfare they were conducting or sponsoring in Morocco, West Africa and the Atlantic Islands.!? The message of Iberian crusading both resembled and differed from that of the anti-Turkish conflict. From a just war perspective, the Castilian Reconquista could be likened to the defensive struggle in the East. Portuguese expansion, on the other hand, was couched in somewhat different terms, those of expanding the limits of the Christian faith through the encouragement of conversion.
These variations in the crusading message can be monitored with relative ease though the study of such evidence as papal bulls of crusade and instructions like those issued by Bessarion. But the message was not communicated in this way only. To begin with, the words on the page give us at best a shadow of what was experienced by people who attended crusade sermons, which always contained an element of improvization and at their most elaborate were carefully orchestrated in a way which came close to modern multi-media events.?? The 'spin' put on the message in such circumstances by gifted preachers who were skilled at ‘reading’ the reactions of their audiences, and made immediate adjustments to their material in response to them, can only be guessed at. In addition, the crusading message was communicated through secular means, above all to audiences within a chivalric milieu. One of the most famous occasions on which an attempt was made to recruit crusaders in this period was Duke Philip the Good's 'Feast of the Pheasant' in 1454, in which banqueting, play-acting, spectacle and display played central roles in summoning the duke's nobles to take arms against the Turks.?!
Having said that, the message usually remains easier to gauge and describe than its reception. It is clear that a straightforward measurement of impact in terms of people taking the cross or making financial contributions towards crusading is not possible. Let us take the example of Germany. Here much of the responsibility for taking action lay with the imperial estates, without whose financial support military activity was all but impossible to organize. Study of the Reichtage reveals a response that was complicated by issues of constitutional reform, regional rivalries, the perennial jockeying for imperial and papal favour, and a consciousness of other threats to the empire, notably the Hussites to the east and Burgundy to the west. In the end, the German estates did fail to rise to the occasion, for which Hungary and some of the Austrian lands paid a heavy price. But to label their response as one of apathy or irresponsibility, though at times it is tempting and certainly reflects the disappointment felt by some contemporaries, including Bessarion, is too glib a judgement. It also fails to take into account the fact that if a military response to the Ottoman advance was not forthcoming, the repeated discussion of the Turkish threat made the imago turci one of the most familiar and multifaceted aspects of the empire's religious, political and cultural life from the mid-fifteenth to the midsixteenth century. We have to consider the possibility that the deepest impact of the crusade lay not, as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the raising and despatch of large armies of armed pilgrims, but in the way the preaching, rhetoric and liturgy of the crusade moulded a rapidly changing European society.? Too often the assumption has been made that in instances when military consequences were few, the message simply bounced off a soil which had ceased to be receptive to it: in fact, it could have entered the soil and borne quite different fruit.
Sometimes, in any case, the soil did prove fruitful in the way that was hoped for. The preaching of the cruzada in Iberia, in particular Castile, is the clearest example. In his Historia de la Bula de la cruzada en España (1958) Jose Goni Gaztambide carefully catalogued the numerous occasions when the cruzada was preached in Spain, and its financial returns for the monarchies of Castile and Portugal could clearly be substantial. The crusading message was carefully orchestrated by royal government, and it accorded with periodic waves of eschatology and messianic conviction as well as with chivalric urges. In Iberia, more than anywhere else, the popularity of crusading can scarcely be doubted. Because of the assumption that the cruzada meant nothing but the sale of indulgences and the conviction that this was at heart a corrupt practice which undermined devotion, there has been a tendency to view the cruzada as discreditable. Certainly, the way it was preached aroused disquiet, yet its close association with the final act of the Reconquista, the conquest of Granada, can hardly be questioned, and the broad popularity of this war is not in doubt.
In this respect the problem becomes the very different response that the crusading message achieved in Hungary and Poland. These were territories, especially Hungary, where the threat posed by the Turks was obvious. Here, to use Bessarion's language, country, homes, children, family and wives were at stake; even more than in Castile and Portugal, one would expect the call to arms to have succeeded. But in practice the response was highly problematic. Large-scale armies of crusaders were raised by preaching in Hungary in 1456 and 1514, but on both occasions they were armies of peasants, and in 1514 their crusade mutated into a social revolt. The paralysis of the Hungarian ruling elite is remarkable, and even more than in the case of the German estates, the question must be posed whether this paralysis was political, structural, cultural or some combination of these. The comparison with Poland helps. Once the threat posed by the Teutonic Knights' Ordensstaat had been ended with the peace of Thorn in 1466, Poland was in a position to respond more effectively to the Ottoman threat. Its failure to respond to papal promptings seems to have been due to several interlocking causes: the population at large was suspicious of the motives and intentions of the ruling elites in both Church and State, while those elites harboured the hope that the Carpathians provided a sufficient barrier to Ottoman incursions on any large scale (a geographical antemurale, in fact), and that the riches of the Danubian plain would prove to be a more seductive prospect.
Whichever geographical area we take and social or political level we inspect, the impact of the crusading message was complex, but remained important. The rulers of Poland and Hungary, and the Knights of St John at Rhodes, welcomed and nurtured the antemurale ideology, as the kings of Castile did that of Reconquista, not only because it might attract external or release internal resources, but because it flattered their self-image. To view them as coldly and methodically ‘milking’ the advantages of crusade is almost certainly misguided. The crusade was a part of their present world as well as their heritage from the past and, in the eastern lands, the Turks were advancing. In the case of their subjects, crusading was associated with fraud and disappointment, but it also belonged to their beliefs, and the spiritual benefits conferred by crusade were part of a sacramental system in which they vested their hopes of salvation. It is too easy to dismiss crusading as part of a world which was vanishing as all the regions of Europe moved towards the ‘new world’ of Reformation, consolidated military structures, and the practice of Realpolitik. Such changes were slow and piecemeal, and they incorporated parts of the ‘old’ world rather than rudely discarding them. This applies to the military and political aspects of crusading, but above all to its place in the religious thinking of contemporaries. Like other features of late medieval religion, the place of crusading becomes harder to assess the more we question the exact nature of the break-up of Catholic unity in the early sixteenth century.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق